


H-E-Double Hockey Sticks

by tomato_greens



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2018-08-13 21:37:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7987087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Check Please! fanfic variety show (which is to say: fics prompted by other people and fics or fic excerpts shorter than ~1,000 words). Each chapter is rated individually.</p><p>Subjects tackled thus far include: 1) making an ass out of you and me; 2) the magic of corporate sponsorships; 3) is three really company?; 4) the new New South; 5) bungs; 6) softshell lobster; 7) all that glitters is(n’t?) gold, 8) toils and troubles in the Pegasus galaxy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bitty/Holster - no warnings - rated T

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the lovely [therichardhammond](http://therichardhammond.tumblr.com), who requested "happy Bittyholtz"! 
> 
> (my immediate response was, _what is happiness???_ )

At first Bitty thinks Holster’s the only one secure enough in his heterosexuality to throw down on the dance floor, but after the third kegster in a row that Holster grinds up on him and then, later, brings him up to the attic and sticks his tongue in his mouth, Bitty gets a clue and gasps, “You’re not straight!”

Holster squints down at him—he never wears his glasses to parties, and he’d blinked out one of his contacts into the tub juice—and says, one hand still under Bitty’s shirt, “Uh.”

Suddenly the way they’re clutching each other seems awkward, an unwelcome intimacy, so Bitty releases Holster’s dick and surreptitiously wipes his hand off on the back of his jeans. “It’s an easy mistake,” he tries, laughing a little.

“I sucked you off, Bits,” Holster says, yellow eyebrows bunched up together. He disentangles himself, straightens up; Bitty wishes faintly that he hadn’t, since Holster’s pecs are now immediately in his line of vision and Bitty’s first instinct is still to bite them just to verify that they’re real. “I thought we kind of had something going here.”

Bitty says, “Well, I don’t know!” and waves his hands around, almost clipping Holster in the eye, at which point Holster lets go of him entirely and puts some space between them. “How am I supposed to know what straight boys do after half a keg? I’ve never been straight!” 

Holster shrugs and crosses his giant arms protectively in front of himself. “I mean, me neither.” 

No adequate response occurs to him, so Bitty runs his fingers through his hair and then without thinking blurts out, “Have you ever heard the term ‘three-beer queer’?” at which point Holster’s whole face drops into a stony Nordic stoicism and he lets himself out.

“Not cool, dude,” Ransom’s voice says. Bitty whips around to find Ransom and—May? June? January? Bitty can’t remember—tangled up together in the same bunk in which Bitty got his first blow job three weeks ago. Bitty only has a second to wonder whose bed it actually is before he realizes Ransom’s dick is actively inside September, at which point escape seems the better part of valor.

But the attic stairs are narrower and steeper than Bitty’s muscle memory expects them to be, despite the many lectures Ransom and Shitty have forced him to sit through on the Haus’s venerable state, so halfway down Bitty slips and feels his entire stomach go cold and tight with dread as he pitches forward—goodbye, legs; goodbye, scholarship; goodbye, Samwell. 

"Whoa,” Holster says, wearing his glasses now and somehow halfway up the stairs and catching Bitty around the waist. “I was coming back up—you okay?”

“It’s not that I didn’t think you couldn’t be, uh, like me,” Bitty starts, a thousand miles ahead and already wishing he could stuff his own best oven glove into his mouth. Holster’s eyebrows raise, so Bitty plunges forward blindly. “It’s just that, I don’t know, on the internet straight guys do all sorts of stuff and I thought—I don’t know, maybe you were desperate?” he tries, his voice fading into an extremely embarrassing squeak.

Holster carefully lets go of Bitty and pinches his nose extravagantly, throwing his glasses out of whack. It is, horrifically, very cute. “Bitty. Bits. Bittlemeister. Are you—” and here his shoulders start to shake— “are you talking about gay porn?”

“What!” Bitty cries, attempting outrage, but the humiliating truth is that he _is_ talking about gay porn and not even the kind you pay for, so he grabs onto the railing and stiffly says, “Excuse me,” in his best impersonation of Joan Crawford.

Holster grabs back onto him, clamping onto his shoulders a little too tightly, which he knows Bitty likes from the last time when Bitty accidentally pulled out one of Holster’s chest hairs. “No, no, it’s cool, we all have needs.”

“Oh my god!” Bitty says as he shuttles, tragically, out of Crawford and back into himself. 

Then Holster’s face softens and Bitty can’t stop himself from righting Holster’s glasses. “Bitty,” Holster says, very gently, “do you really think someone who’s seen every season of _30 Rock_ six to eight times hasn’t jerked it to gay porn at least once?”

Bitty shrugs under the weight of Holster’s hands, looks away.

He leans in even closer until his lips brush Bitty’s ear. “Well, I’ve jerked it way more than once.”

Bitty gasps in a breath and then they’re staring at each other, the air charged, until Holster looks down at Bitty’s dick and grins.

“Ransom’s in there with what’s-her-name!” Bitty bursts out, strangled with lust. “February?”

“November?” Holster tries, then shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, uh—there’s always the couch—”

Bitty shakes his head regretfully and says, aiming for Norma Shearer but landing back on Crawford, “Your dick is not worth that couch.”

“Johnson,” Holster realizes, his eyes alight. “He’s away for the weekend, he won’t care—”

Normally the idea of making out on someone else’s bed would fill Bitty with something other than blind desire, but that day is not today, because he grabs Holster’s muscular forearm with one hand and Holster’s dick with the other and squeezes a little.

“Fuck!” Holster shouts. “You little shit—”

“Who are you calling a little shit?” Bitty asks in his haughtiest voice, feeling Holster’s forearm shift as Holster clenches his hand into a fist. On second thought, he slaps Holster’s thigh, which has the excellent outcome of Holster panting out a sustained and high-pitched _fuuuuuuck_. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can come say hi at my [slow-paced fanblog](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com) or my [significantly more embarrassing personal blog](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com)!


	2. Bitty/Jack - warnings: mpreg, Long John Silver's - rated T

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
> 
> this was written for [familiar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar).

The second pregnancy is worse than the first. For one thing, Jack’s back starts aching immediately, like it remembers the indignities of childbirth and is beginning its protests early. For another, Bitty is too distracted by five-year-old Ophélie to fulfill Jack’s cravings with homemade if monstrous creations, like the infamous peanut-butter-pickle cupcakes—the video for which, Jack will never be quick to forget, broke a million YouTube hits. 

Jack shows earlier, his body dropping too-quickly into a miserable sloppiness that sees him abandon his post-retirement routine for lying around in sweats and feeling sorry for himself. Bitty rolls his eyes a lot and ushers Ophélie out of the room. This is probably because he doesn’t trust Jack around their daughter. This is depressing, but it’s also a relief: Jack just doesn’t know what to do with Ophélie most of the time. He knows, logically, that she came out of his body, but she seems largely alien to him, tiny and already more articulate than he is, a shrill presence who always seems to be demanding things of him he doesn’t know how to give. 

Bitty rolls his eyes and calls Jack a drama queen whenever Jack tries to say any of this, so Jack only brings it up in their marriage counseling sessions when he thinks Bitty deserves a talking-to. Their counselor tends to side with Jack, which is one of the reasons he likes her so much. He’s not sure if she’s a hockey fan or he’s just right more often than Bitty is. 

He’s six months along, stretched out on his study’s couch, and already wants to die. He swore he’d never have another baby after Ophélie, but he’s serious this time: Jack will give Bitty anything he thinks Bitty wants, but if there’s another baby after this one, they’ll have to find some other sucker. He used to fantasize about being fucked while pregnant, but the reality is significantly more uncomfortable, especially now that they have to be silent in case Ophélie wakes up in the middle of the night and comes wandering into their bedroom. 

“My parents always locked their door at night and I ended up fine,” Jack pointed out once last year, desperate for it. Bitty snorted and then refused to tell Jack what that had meant. In any case, the door has stayed unlocked.

Jack switches between Lifetime and HGTV for an hour before he gives up and finds a hockey game. It’s Western Conference, which is good for background noise. Jack might have bounced around a little during the latter part of his career, but he’s never played for either the Aces or the Blackhawks. He watches Birdy hit a goalpost and tries not to be jealous that Parse is still on the ice, still with his original team. Anyway, Jack doesn’t even like Las Vegas. 

He dozes for a little, then rouses when Ophélie traipses in and hops up on the couch at his feet. Bitty swears that she loves him. Jack remains unconvinced that children can feel love before the age of ten. He certainly doesn’t remember feeling anything other than concern for himself at that age; why should Ophélie be any different? 

“Papa,” Ophélie says, hitting him gently with the side of her hand. “Papa, is the funny man coming back on?”

“The funny man?” Jack mumbles, turning a little so he can see her better. She’s small for her age, like Bitty, with Jack’s dark hair and prominent nose. She might be beautiful when she gets older; it’s hard to tell, with all of her still so unformed. 

“The pirate man,” Ophélie explains, covering one eye. 

Jack still doesn’t know what she’s talking about it. On screen, Parse’s celly makes him feel faintly ill. “Sure,” he tries. It seems safe enough. Bitty will explain it to her if he’s wrong. 

Ophélie lets out a little-girl shriek and bounces on her legs. Jack wonders if he loves her. He thinks he does. It’s hard to tell, so close up. When he thinks about life without her he feels like some distant part of himself has been ripped up, so he probably does—love her. 

The announcers’ voices fade out into an advertisement. Jack closes his eyes, ignoring Ophélie’s squeal of excitement, until he hears a familiar voice say, “Arrrgh, mateys! Sail on—”

Jack shoots up, dislodging Ophélie, who tumbles happily to the floor, still repeating in her squeak along with Kent Parson’s stupid voice, “—into Long John Silver’s for deals on shrimp scampi!” 

Parse is wearing an eyepatch and grinning, desultory, disheveled. Cute, Jack thinks, and then wants to throw up. Ophélie is crawling back towards him, but Jack suddenly can’t be here, can’t be in this body with Kent Parson looking at him and his daughter latched onto his ankles, so he removes Ophélie’s hands and stomps away.

“Papa!” Ophélie calls after him, “Papa! Viens, viens ici!” Her accent is good. Jack can’t deal with that either, this further proof of his extended bloodline, the way French comes to her the way English did to him: the mother tongue of her lesser parent. Jack doesn’t blame her for loving Kent Parson in an eyepatch or for taking after Bitty, but he can’t bear to be around her right now, the way she might not love him but she so clearly trusts him not to hurt her. He will hurt her. It is inevitable. 

He gets up to the bedroom and shuts and locks the door behind him. His phone is in his pocket; Kent’s in the middle of a game, but he scrolls through his contacts and clicks Parse anyway. 

_Seriously, what the fuck is up with that commercial?_ he types. 

That’s rude. He considers it, deletes it. _I like the eye patch_ , he tries. There; that seems casual. That’s a text that a normal person would write. He sends it before he can think it over again, then puts his phone down on the bedside table. It’s only 5:30. Well, it’s 10:30 somewhere, Jack thinks, and climbs into bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come hang out with me on [tumblr](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)!


	3. Jack/Bitty/Parse - warnings: mpreg, Long John Silver's - rated E

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was written for [familiar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar), who is the most talented writer in this fandom; thanks for helping me achieve the next level of Gross Sex Writing.

“Bring the eyepatch,” Bittle says when he invites Kent to dinner, and Kent thinks, okay, before Bittle continues, “our daughter really likes those commercials you do, you know, for that fish chain?”

“Sure,” Kent says, relieved that it’s not something weirder. 

So he brings the eyepatch. He has three of them, one from each commercial; it’s not that he believes in talismans but that he collects them unthinkingly. It’s easy enough to push aside the pucks and matchbooks and fucking lipsticks that have gathered in the back of his closet and shove the eyepatch in with his socks and the polo shirt he packed because he knows it will drive Jack nuts. 

The flight is boring. He munches on complimentary pretzels and wishes he’d sprung for First Class. It’s stupid, frankly, not to, although his financial advisor frequently congratulates him for being the biggest cheapskate in the NHL. Ha ha, Fran always says, elbowing Kent in the side, cheapskate. 

You kiss your wife with that mouth? Kent always asks her. It’s almost a non sequitur but she thinks he’s stupid, so she doesn’t care, just laughs harder. As far as Kent’s concerned, this is one of the nicest things about her.

They land roughly. Kent scatters the last of his pretzels across the lap of the woman next to him. “Cool,” she says, lips pursed like a true Vegas starlet. “That’s just—really cool.”

“You want me to get you more pretzels?” he says dumbly.

“I’ve had enough of your pretzels,” she says. Women don’t usually do it for him anymore but there’s something about the disapproving twist to her mouth that gets him going, a little, which is probably why, when he sees Bitty waiting in the arrivals section with his hands on his waist and a faintly disgusted moue playing around his mouth, Kent feels a spike of arousal stab directly through his pre-frontal cortex and into his lizard brain. Fuck. 

“Hey, Bittle,” Kent says, plastering on his best media smile and holding out a hand for Bittle to shake. Bittle does, limply, clearly unimpressed by Kent as he always is; they’ve known each other in one capacity or another for over a decade, and Bittle has never been able to rouse himself to treat Kent like anything other than something on the sole of his shoe he hasn’t yet scraped off. 

“Let’s go,” Bittle says, and starts navigating the crowd with his usual bitchy confidence. Kent follows silently and tries not to stare too obviously at Bittle’s ass. “Jack wanted to come,” Bitty is saying, not even bothering to turn his head, “but he’s too uncomfortable.”

“He’s due soon, isn’t he?” 

“Two weeks, thank god. Any longer and I’d reach in to pull out Michel myself.”

“Another Frenchie, huh?”

“It’s their her-i-tage,” Bittle says very slowly and precisely. “It’s important to Jack.”

Kent wonders; Jack speaks French, obviously, but he’s never seemed to care very much about Québec. Except for the hockey, of course. “How’s Ophélie?” he asks instead of bringing up Jack’s history of pervasive apathy.

He knows from experience that Bittle can talk about his daughter without pause or breath for literal hours, and luckily, Bittle does, chattering mindlessly while they find the car—it’s a hideous mom car, an SUV that Kent’s embarrassed to be near—and Bittle gusts out a huge sigh over the parking fee. Kent forks over the $5. Bittle takes it without so much as thanking him and continues to discuss the miraculous doings of his child, who can spell her name and for some reason thinks Kent in an eyepatch is a worthwhile cause for her devotion.

“Don’t ask me how it started,” Bittle warns him, “she was watching a game with Jack and—well, you know how kids are.”

Really, Kent doesn’t. He tries to minimize his impact on the young. He nods along gamely, though.

There’s something about Bittle that’s magnetic, as much as Kent doesn’t particularly like him; it’s probably what makes him such a good TV personality, if his cooking show on local cable counts for anything. Kent isn’t sure that it does, but he can imagine Bittle’s spark reaching much farther, if he’d ever really pursued a career of his own. Bittle drives with one hand and gestures with the other, his slim wrist crooked at an angle that in another man would be self-parody. 

At one point, the car in front of them stops suddenly, and Bittle automatically throws an arm across Kent as he slams on the brakes. “Kids,” he explains, the warm brush of his elbow peaking one of Kent’s nipples. 

“Sure,” says Kent. 

Bittle gives him a sidelong long and retracts his arm a little too lingeringly to be accidental. Kent reassesses the eyepatch.

Jack opens the door while Bitty is searching for his key. Ophélie, tiny and brown-haired, peeks out from behind his knee. “Hey,” Jack says, nudging Ophélie away from him and ushering Bittle in. “It’s been a long time.”

“No kidding,” Kent says, the usual confused pulse of Jack’s presence welling up in his chest, confounded by Jack’s unwashed hair and huge belly. “Can I,” he says, reaching out, vaguely aware of Bittle greeting Ophélie and pulling her into the kitchen while Kent and Jack stay frozen in the foyer.

“Can you,” Jack repeats, looking confused, then his expression clears when Kent wiggles his fingers. “Oh, sure. He’s not really moving around right now, though. He’s probably sleeping.”’

“He’s big enough to sleep?” Kent asks, laying his palms high on the taut round drum of Jack’s stomach. 

“He’s big enough to live,” Jack explains with an irritated expression. “If he were outside already he’d be eating.”

“Eating,” Kent says, marveling a little at it. He and Jack weren’t talking during Jack’s first pregnancy, Jack still too angry that he’d had to take a season off while Kent was swanning around having his fingers broken on the ice and blowing men in bars. Now Jack’s retired and Kent’s about to be, and they’re going to have dinner that Jack’s husband cooks for them while Jack’s daughter peppers Kent with questions about being a pirate.

“Do you mind if I wash up?”

“We have a guest bathroom upstairs,” Jack reminds him, “the one you use every time you come here.”

“I’ll just go wash my face and change.”

“Okay,” Jack says, clearly disinterested, moving in his slow and hobbling way towards the kitchen, where Ophélie’s little voice chatters at a speed that rivals her father’s.

Kent wipes his dick and his pits, washes his face, changes into his nicest $200 jeans and the polo shirt, a genuine article with the aggressive pony stitched onto it and everything. He learned after the first time he was invited to a Bittle-Zimmermann dinner and made the mistake of assuming it would be an informal affair. 

Coming down, he catches himself eyeing the family photographs that line the stairwell. His own mother loved hideous posed Sears catalogue shots, and despite the carefully-chosen candids peppered in among the frames, Bittle—it has to be Bittle who decorates the place—seems to like a modern version in the same vein. In between Bittle’s slick smile and Jack’s stiff grimaces, Ophélie canters through the photos in horrendous frilly dresses with necklines far too old for her. The South is a terrifying place, Kent realizes, as he does every time he meets Bittle.

“Are you ready for dinner, Mr. Parson?” Ophélie asks him, shyly, from the bottom of the staircase. She’s cute; her coloring makes her look like Jack in miniature, but she’s got Bittle’s gigantic eyes. 

“You got it, kiddo,” Kent says, smiling down at her. She squeals in laughter when he leans in close, pulls the eyepatch out of his pocket, and snaps it on his face. “You want to go eat some food, matey?”

“Aye aye, sail on into Long John Silver’s!” Ophélie recites. Her clear delight is almost enough to lessen Kent’s embarrassment about the whole deal. He’s got nothing against frozen fish and they’d offered a lot, but he’s been getting a lot of flack about his performance; there’s something heady about Ophélie’s obvious excitement. He offers her hand, and she pulls him through to the kitchen table.

The Zimmerman-Bittles have a formal dining room, but that seems to be saved for special occasions, or maybe just when Bittle isn’t sure he’s whipped his guest into submission yet; the first dinner Kent was ever invited to, well before Ophélie was conceived, was in the dining room. 

Kent’s seat is marked, for god’s sake, by a handwritten place card. “This is you, Mr. Parson,” Ophélie says, obviously coached, and drops his hand before hopping into her own seat. Jack groans in, one hand on the small of his back, just as Bittle brings in the beautiful tray of grilled salmon. The centerpiece has the head on and everything, the eye sockets stuffed with little bouquets of rosemary.

“I thought it was appropriate,” Bittle says after he sets the tray down, smiling hugely, one hand clenched on the back of Jack’s neck. Ophélie doesn’t complain the way Kent would expect her to, just sits and waits with her hands folded; she’s an eerily polite child, actually, now that Kent thinks about it, quiet in a way that makes Kent feel sorry for her. Maybe a little boy will do this household good.

“Well, tuck in!” Bittle insists, still standing. Kent looks to Jack for a clue, but Jack is stonily quiet, his hands on his belly and his brow furrowed. Kent takes a fish and, guessing, puts it on Ophélie’s plate.

“Hey, that hasn’t been boned,” Bittle says, leaping forward to take the plate away before Ophélie can start eating. “She gets her own special plate.”

“I didn’t know,” Kent tries.

“Hmph,” Bittle says, and sets the fish back down in front of Kent.

It’s not the tensest dinner Kent’s ever been to, though it’s awkward, chewing around fish bones while Bittle prattles on—he’s a preternaturally cheerful host. Ophélie takes after him in this, too, because when Kent asks her about school, she happily tells him about her kindergarten class, her teacher’s beautiful coils of hair, the mean boy who stole her, Christ, favorite pirate doll.

“I told you he probably just does that because he likes you,” Bittle interrupts her to say. 

Kent hides a grimace and reminds himself to pay for Ophélie’s self-defense classes when she gets older.

Eventually he’s left with a spine and dozens of tiny spiky bones he doesn’t know what to do with. Jack has barely eaten anything, even after Bittle took over stripping the meat from the bones for him and handing him fragrant, steaming fish. He must be in a mood; well, who wouldn’t be, eight months pregnant and bigger than a typical suburban house? 

“All done?” Bittle asks, standing against, practically looming. “Ophélie’s spending the night with her Uncle Crappy, so we want to get dessert in before he comes to take her.”

“Uh, yeah,” Kent agrees, still uncertain what’s expected of him. Should he keep the eyepatch on? Is it weird, now? He had his eyebrows threaded before the most recent filming and they’re starting to grow in again. Does the black strap bisecting his left eyebrow make that obvious?

“You want pie?” Jack grunts abruptly, the first thing he’s deigned to say to Kent the entire meal. “Bitty made apple for tonight, but we have some strawberry rhubarb in the fridge.” 

“Apple’s fine,” Kent says, faintly. Jack heaves himself to his feet and takes the empty platter to the sink, leaving Kent and Ophélie for all intents and purposes alone.

Ophélie glances at her parents, then leans in conspiratorially. “Mr. Parson,” she says, very solemnly, “are you really a pirate?”

Kent thinks quickly. “Would someone who isn’t a pirate have this?” He snaps the eyepatch’s strap. Ow.

Whatever their faults, though, the Zimmermann-Bittles apparently raise no fools, because Ophélie frowns and says, “Yes, you could buy one in the store.”

“That’s true,” Kent concedes. “But this one was given to me.”

“By Long John Silver?”

“Yes,” says Kent. Technically, it’s true.

Ophélie is about to pounce on that when Bittle comes back in, a pie in hand. “Don’t bother Mr. Parson, hon,” Bittle pronounces, and before Kent can reassure them all that he’s not being bothered, Ophélie settles back in her seat and takes a sip of her milk like she’s drowning her sorrows. Kent’s going to miss her when Jack’s shitty best friend picks her up for their play date or whatever; she’s clearly the only sane one in the room. 

The pie is good; of course, it’s always good. Bittle’s talent is one of his worst qualities, along with his likability. 

Eventually, even Bittle’s voice runs thin. Ophélie is clearly bored, in the way well-bred only children get bored: eyes wandering, feet swinging freely under her seat until Bittle places a hand on her knee. She sighs and slumps back in her chair, the tiny crescent of her body a study in frustration. 

“When’s Uncle B getting here?” she asks, daring to swing her feet again, though in smaller arcs. She’s, what, five, and already learning to sneak past her parents? Kent redoubles on his internal promise to pay for her self-defense classes. He notices that her socks have long lace edges doubled back down towards her patent Mary Janes. It’s so tacky—and Kent lives in Las Vegas. He wonders again why he was invited. 

“Speak of the devil,” Bittle murmurs, just as their front door lets out a deeply pretentious and electronic jangle. Jack grunts and lumbers off, one hand low on his back, like he’s slipping his fingers down to cup his own ass. 

For God’s sake, you’re sitting next to a kid, Kent reminds himself. 

In a rare moment of good luck, Ophélie isn’t paying any attention to Kent, her entire focus on the doorway out of the kitchen and the low voices drifting through it. She reminds Kent of nothing so much as a very eager and well-trained dog, waiting to be let out of the car. He feels bad for this comparison, and after a second he feels even worse for Ophélie. 

Jack’s best friend Knight comes in, then, with a bright pink backpack that clearly belongs to Ophélie in one hand. He’s got the same stupid mustache he’s had since the first time Kent met him when Jack was still in college. “Ready to go, kiddo?” Knight asks, smiling down at her. 

“Can I be excused?” Ophélie says to Bittle, who says, “May I,” sharply but waves her towards Knight’s waiting hug. Ophélie wiggles out of her seat and Kent realizes, all of a sudden, how much tension she’d been holding in her little body. She’s loose now, smiling hugely, and runs into Knight’s open arms. “Uncle B!” she shrieks.

“O!” he yells back at her, joyously, picking her up and swinging her around so her legs fly out behind her. 

Soon enough, Shitty heads out the door, Ophélie tucked under his arm like a delighted football. The three of them—the four of them, including Jack’s belly—are left alone.

Kent wants to break through the brittle silence left in Ophélie’s wake, but before he can get out so much as a How ’bout them Red Sox, Jack grabs Bittle’s hand, looks Kent dead in the eyes, and asks, one sweaty black curl stuck to his eyebrow, “Do you want to fuck me?”

Shamefully, the answer is yes; it’s usually yes, despite Jack’s many faults. “I mean—” he says.   

“And me,” Bittle adds, casually. “Well, not fuck me, per se. But I’d be there.” 

The whole evening spins out into another perspective. Kent removes the eyepatch, blinking rapidly as he readjusts. 

“You don’t have to take that off,” Bittle suggests.

“I’m not fucking anybody wearing anything from Long John Silver’s,” Kent snaps. “Sorry.”

Bittle sighs out, “No need for apologies, honey,” and, tugging Jack behind him, saunters from the kitchen. Neither he nor Jack look behind them, which would be infuriating on its own, but is especially infuriating because Kent is following them against his own best interests. Stop moving, he tells his feet, but they continue stubbornly on after Jack, the way they always do. 

Kent’s never noticed this before, but, halfway up the stairs with his eyes affixed on the backs of Jack’s thighs, he realizes that Bittle moves his hips like a woman. Jack, despite one of his hand supporting the crook of his back, is unmistakably straight-hipped, so much so that he looks frankly unequipped to handle pregnancy even eight months into it. Bittle, on the other hand, sashays up the stairs like a goddamn pageant queen. 

“The choreography might be a little difficult,” Bittle says as he lets them into the bedroom, “but we’ll make do.”

Kent isn’t sure what he was expecting—some kind of Fifty Shades torture chamber in red lace and leather?—but their bedroom is designer-masculine, very expensive and a little boring. The bed has at least four extra pillows on it. There’s some hideous modern art above the dresser and a floor-length mirror strewn with a couple of very staid ties that Kent definitely refuses to admit he recognizes from Jack’s post-game footage. 

“Please tell me you don’t use those for bondage,” Kent cracks, gesturing at the ties.

Neither Jack nor Bittle says anything in response, though Bittle emits an audible sniff. Kent suddenly finds himself imagining Jack tied up, Bittle gleaming-eyed over him, with a horrifying psychic clarity that he’s never wished for. 

“Get on the bed,” Bittle says, the command in his voice sharp and clear. Is he talking to Kent? What the fuck is going on here? But Jack settles heavily onto the sheets, barely mussing their military precision. “You gonna take your pants off or is he gonna have to do it for you?” Bittle continues, and Kent realizes that Bittle has brought him into it whether he wants to be there or not. 

“I can do it,” Jack assures Bittle. He sounds a little strained. Kent is weirdly jolted into the past, the way Jack used to smile at him through a fistful of chicken tenders, sighing out flecks of white meat as his face contorted. Jack always ate too fast when they were younger; inevitably he’d have to clutch at his belly afterwards, and Kent would rub his back for twenty minutes in the middle of whatever shitty fast food booth they’d tumbled into. Anxiety, Kent thinks now, but back then he didn’t have the words for it. It was just Jack: Jack in pain. Kent’s never been able not to respond. 

The promontory of Jack’s belly looks especially bizarre now that Jack’s removed the safe barrier of his boxers. His dick hangs in a kind of pendulous limpness below the belly, the black hair barely visible in the crease between Jack’s belly and thighs. Kent feels a pulse of tenderly familiar arousal, almost leftovers rather than something vibrant or new. 

“Shirt, too,” Bittle says, which is certainly new.

Jack didn’t need this kind of bossing around the first time they were together. Or maybe he did—maybe that was the problem. Maybe Kent had never been able to provide what Jack needed. 

“Stop standing there with that look on your face and get over here,” Bittle says, directly to Kent this time. Instinctively, Kent heads for the bed, sits down fully dressed and waits for Bittle’s discerning eye to tell him what to do next. It’s not technically the weirdest shit Kent’s ever done in bed—during his self-destructive spiral in 2011, he got involved with an enema performance artist—but it might be the weirdest he’s ever felt. Even counting the enemas and his eyebrows and the lisp he’s never managed to fully eradicate, Kent’s a pretty butch guy. No one’s ever stood in front of him, hands on hips, and frowned at him like his sixpack and his fuck-you millions just aren’t enough. 

“Touch him,” Bittle says. Jack doesn’t move, just continues to breathe shallowly. “Touch him,” Bittle insists, so Kent figures Bittle’s talking to him and that he might as well play along.

Other than the occasional handshake or high five, it’s the first time Kent has touched Jack’s bare skin in two decades. He’s shaking, he finds, rubbing the odd hard lump of Jack’s belly. “Yeah,” says Bittle, eyes intent. Underneath Kent’s hand, Jack’s skin erupts in goosebumps, though Jack is still staring at the ceiling. Kent wants to make sure that Jack is present, or at least enjoying himself, but that seems too intimate underneath Bittle’s expectant silence. 

On second thought, that’s fucking stupid. “Jack,” he whispers, stroking Jack’s cheek. “Jack.”

Jack’s eyes flutter to Kent, then back towards the ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye, Kent can see that Jack’s dick starts to pay attention.

“Hands off his face,” Bittle says harshly. “Stay below his neck.” 

“But he likes it,” Kent finds himself arguing. “Look. It feels good, doesn’t it, Jack?”

Jack doesn’t respond at first, just closes his eyes. Then he licks his lips and mumbles something that twenty years in hockey arenas has left Kent slightly too deaf to understand.

“What?”

“Do what Bittle says,” Jack repeats, a little louder. “Whatever Bittle wants is good.”

“What the fuck,” Kent hisses, wondering exactly how Bittle has managed to brainwash Jack into this eerie obeisance, but in the end he does what Bittle wants and removes his thumb from Jack’s rough cheek. Jack seems to sigh out in a little relief. Does he not actually want Kent there? But there’s no way to ask; there’s barely any room for Kent to sit on the bed and carefully avoid Jack’s face; there’s no room at all for him to speak.

“Get him hard,” Bittle orders, so Kent starts stroking Jack with the tips of his fingers, a lot gentler than he used to get Jack hard: they used to be all fists and teeth. But Jack seems to need something soft, now, the strain on his body evident from the way he’s closing his eyes, his hands clenched in awkward angles. Slowly, slowly, Jack hardens. Kent looks around for lube and then just spits in his hand before getting his hand back around Jack; Jack never used to like it dry. 

“Put a finger in him,” Bittle continues.

“Yeah,” Jack moans, turning his head into the pillow. “Come on, Kenny, do it.”

“I don’t have any lube,” Kent points out. For a second no one says anything and he realizes, fuck, he’s in it deep, these two are into some hardcore shit, before Bittle makes a rustling sound behind him. A tube of KY hits him in the arm a lot harder than it needs to. “Condoms?” Kent tries, and a foil packet stings the back of his neck with the force of the throw. 

“Whatever makes you feel most comfortable,” Bittle simpers. “Jack and I have moved past needing all this extra baggage.”

Kent does not point out that they still have evidence of a saner sex life lying around. He doesn’t want to know if it’s for guys like him, hoodwinked into fucking them before they know it, or whether Bittle’s lying. The condoms aren’t expired yet, at least. “I’m gonna suck you,” Kent promises Jack, who groans.

“Ah ah ah, I don’t think so,” Bittle says, coming around the other side of the bed and wagging a finger. “Not unless I say so.”

Kent gazes down at Jack’s dick, which looks just about as it’s always looked. Jack is well-proportioned, circumcised, and largely uninterested in trimming, although Bittle’s civilizing influence is evident in the neat symmetry of the line of hair trailing from Jack’s belly button to his dick. “Please,” Kent tries. Maybe that’s what Bittle’s into. He looks up and Bittle’s eyebrows are raised. Kent can barely read him, but he thinks maybe Bittle’s unimpressed. He clears his throat and says it again: “Please.” 

“Not before you get in him,” Bittle warns, crossing his arms over his chest. “Maybe afterwards, if you’re very good.”

So that’s the kind of game they’re into playing—okay. It’s not usually Kent’s thing but at least he feels on solider ground than he has since he first showed up and had to pretend he understood what Jack wanted from him. 

“Please,” Kent tries one more time, making himself pout. 

“Don’t be inauthentic with me,” Bittle snaps. “Put your fingers in Jack or you’ll never get to suck anybody.” 

Kent turns back towards Jack, who’s been suffering while Kent’s paid attention to his husband, his face screwed up in something like pain. His dick is stiff beneath his belly, roughly red with blood, and Kent has to forcibly prevent himself from kissing it while he warms the lube in his hand before sticking his index finger behind Jack’s balls. It’s never easy, the first finger, especially not with Jack’s body swollen and strange. It’s been years for them, anyway, so it’s no wonder that Jack’s body is treating Kent like an intruder. “Come on, hon,” Kent whispers, coaxing Jack’s thighs a little wider. “Can you bear down on me a little?”

“He doesn’t need this,” Bittle says, slapping Jack cheerfully on his haunches. “He can take just about anything you want him to.”

Kent ignores Bittle, although Jack echoes, “I can take it,” in a little strained whisper. Kent can’t bear the idea of just sticking his hand in like he’s unclogging a fucking drain, though; he knows how to use Google, and he knows how at the end of pregnancy everything becomes more tender, more sensitive. If he just shoved his fist in he’d probably start crying, and Bittle would surely never let him live that down. 

Eventually he gets his index finger all the way in. Jack is the same inside, too, warm and a little slick, no wetter than he used to be when Kent would feed him chicken tenders and then bend him over the back of his twin bed. Kent heard that sometimes pregnancy led to real gushing, but Jack doesn’t seem to be in the 25% of men who experience significant increase in self-lubrication. It’s a little disappointing. 

“You feel that, baby?” Bittle asks Jack, leaning over and stroking his hair back from his face. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” 

Bittle’s accent is stretched out and smug, practically languorous, and Kent with a vicious abruptness hates him again. But it’s too late: Kent’s corkscrewing his middle finger into Jack’s ass and Bittle’s apparently an integral part of Jack’s sexual process, these days. 

“Two is enough,” Bittle announces, somehow psychically reading the sweat beading on Jack’s forehead or something. “You can fuck him now.”

“Okay,” Kent agrees, half numb.

“You’ve got to go from behind to give him room,” Bittle continues. “We learned that one the hard way, didn’t we, Jack, sweetheart?”

Jack opens his eyes as Bittle addresses him, but he doesn’t seem completely in the room with them. Kent doesn’t like it. The absence in his gaze feels a lot like back in the bad old days, when Jack was on something and he used to corner Kent in a bathroom at a party with an open, grasping red slash for a mouth. 

“Jack, you okay with this?” Kent asks. 

Jack meets his eyes and for a second Kent isn’t sure what’s going to happen—whether Jack is going to blow this all up, come back to Kent, run away with him to live on a pirate ship, whatever the fuck, just do something besides lie here and wait for Bittle to give permission for Kent to fuck him. But nothing happens. Jack looks away and mumbles, “Yeah, it’s good,” before hauling himself onto his hands and knees, turning around to present Kent with his naked ass. 

“Can I take my pants off, at least?” Kent asks. 

“I guess so,” Bittle agrees magnanimously. One hand soothes Jack’s side like Jack is a nervous animal. “Leave your shirt on, though.”

Kent almost manages to stop himself from rolling his eyes and kicks off his jeans and boxers. He gets more lube, raises himself up behind Jack, kisses him low on the spine and eases his fingers back in. He looks Bittle in the face and says, “Could you put my condom on? I’m a little busy here.”

Bittle stares him down before shrugging with exaggerated nonchalance and agreeing. Kent holds himself very, very still as Bittle rips open the foil packet and rolls the condom down over his dick, just his fingers making tiny nudges in and out of Jack along with his breathing. Having Bittle bent over his most vulnerable part feels dangerous, like at any moment Bittle could just bite it off. But Bittle doesn’t. He isn’t even harsh. He’s just no-nonsense.

“Thanks,” Kent says.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Bittle responds, smiling with all his teeth. 

Jack’s breath hitches as Kent lines himself up. Kent finds himself shy about it, tenderly approaching Jack and backing away again, until Bittle literally grabs him by the balls and forces his hips forward.

“Ow, fuck,” Kent exhales, but he’s already halfway in and it feels pretty good. “Don’t do that again,” he warns Bittle.

“Or what?” Bittle says, definitely unimpressed now. He rubs Jack’s side again, then grabs one of Kent’s hands to feel along Jack’s belly. “There,” he says, “feel that?” 

Underneath Kent’s hand, he feels little hummingbird flutters.

“He’s kicking,” Jack points out unnecessarily.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Kent mutters, because he doesn’t know what to do about any of this, his dick three-quarters of the way inside Jack, Jack and Bittle’s baby kicking his palm through the wall of Jack’s abdomen, the eyepatch abandoned on the dinner table. Despite his best efforts, he’s never before comprehended on a granular level the way Jack gets still and quiet, prey-like, in the face of overstimulation. The baby pushes Kent into his own hollow stillness, though, and he in a blooming revelation understands.

Crack!—Bittle’s slapped him. “Get going,” Bittle says. “I want to see you fuck him.”

What is being most of the way inside another man if not fucking him, Kent wonders, but he eases the rest of the way in, until his balls are flush with the equally soft skin of Jack’s ass. Wait, no; Jack has two pimples, and now Kent can feel them intimately. Being pregnant has got to be a bitch.

Bittle goes for it again, landing the hit right on Kent’s bad hip. “What the fuck,” Kent says.

“I hope you don’t talk like that when the baby’s born,” Bittle sniffs. “Come on, you don’t like to be thrown around a little bit?”

The truth is that Kent does, sometimes—when you’re basically guaranteed a spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame, sometimes you need to be taken down a peg or two. But he never imagined Eric Fucking Bittle, of all soft-spoken Southern baking gay hockey husband poster children, to be into that sort of thing; before tonight, he always thought Bittle’s harmlessness was the appeal of him, the way he probably clutched Jack and cried and kissed his nose as they came in beautiful simultaneous harmony. The stuff of gay romance novels, Kent always assumed, though he hasn’t read any of those since he was sixteen and desperate for Jack’s cock. Well, apparently he was wrong. 

“Maybe next time we can DP, what do you think about that, sweetheart?” Bittle’s musing when Kent starts paying attention to his low monologue again. It’s horrifying, is what it is, but Jack groans the way he used to when he was sixteen and an idiot, mouthing the remains of Kent’s chicken tenders like a metaphor. Kent imagines his dick touching Bittle’s, squirming for purchase inside of Jack. There’s nothing erotic about it, not to Kent, but when Bittle reaches out to stroke Jack’s hair back from his forehead, Jack grabs Bittle’s thumb and sucks it into his mouth, so apparently Kent’s the only one in this situation.

Wait. Next time?

But the moment’s over. Bittle removes his thumb from Jack’s mouth and hovers it over Kent’s ass. “This is okay, right?” he asks, barely waiting for Kent to react before he slips it into Kent. The worst part is that it feels good: something Kent’s been missing. 

“Yeah, come on, fuck me,” Bittle says, his voice gravelly. Kent glances at him out of the corner of his eye. Bittle is finally hard under his trousers, only visibly so because he’s kneeling up to reach Kent better. “Be a good boy,” Bittle warns, and Kent can’t tell who he’s talking to, but he closes his eyes and fucks into Jack and back into Bittle, again, again— 

“Come on,” Bittle insists, “don’t make me spank you again, the first time was fun but this time I’ll mean it—” 

—until he’s done it; he’s coming; somehow, he’s come. 

“Good boy,” Bittle says warmly, which answers that question. Jesus Christ. “You can suck him now.”

Kent’s so eager to get Jack’s dick stuffed unceremoniously down his throat that he forgets about his condom; it’s not until he feels Bittle’s kitchen calluses that he realizes. Bittle peels the sticky latex off of him in one slow pull, pinching the top ineffectively so that some of his own come drips down Kent’s dick. 

“Oops,” Bittle says coquettishly. Kent’s eyes are closed so he can feel Jack’s dick better, but he wonders whether Bittle is fluttering his eyelashes at Jack. It seems like his style. Then a hand swipes at his dick, wiping off the come. Kent’s at a loss—is he going to eat it? What the fuck is going on?—before Bittle’s fingers, slick and smelling like Kent, meet his mouth at the base of Jack’s cock. It’s disgusting. Jack comes down Kent’s throat. 

“You can sleep in the guest room,” Bittle tells Kent after he’s lovingly wiped a washcloth over Jack’s dick and then offered a perfunctory swipe to Kent. Jack’s asleep—he passed out as soon as he came, so Bittle’s been whispering since then, talking Kent through getting his jeans back on, washing his hands, giving Bitty a goodnight kiss on the cheek. “We’ll see you in the morning, though, okay? I’ll get up and make some biscuits just for you.”

“Okay,” Kent offers numbly.

“It’s my specialty,” Bitty promises him. “You’ll love it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come hang on [tumblr](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)!


	4. “field order 15” - Bitty vs. OFC, Ford - warnings: racism, sexism, unreliable narration - rated T

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen, sometimes you’re a history teacher on your lunch break

“Sherman was _brutal_ , though,” Bitty says, one hand fluttering near his collarbone like it’s searching for his great-great-grandmother’s pearls—fuck, tone it down—“I mean, Atlanta was _destroyed_.”

“Is this really happening,” says one of Lardo’s terrifying art friends in a totally expressionless voice, joint in one hand, nighttime sunglasses bobbing on her puffy bun as she shakes her head.

Bitty can’t tell who she’s talking to; Lardo and Shitty skipped out twenty minutes ago, and Lardo’s friend is staring straight at him, not at the coterie of leather-jacketed women gathering in a slow phalanx around her. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out how aggressive that campaign was.”

“Is he actually talking to me about this,” says the friend, addressing someone behind Bitty—he turns and sees the new manager, what’s her name, oh, Ford, with the cute glasses and the hair.

“I’m new here,” says Ford, eyes wide, but as Bitty turns around he senses Ford making a gesture behind him, though he can’t tell what it is. Oh, really? Really? These people are going to gang up on him in his own home?

“I don’t want to step on your toes or anything, hon, but as an American Studies major—”

“Here we go,” says Lardo’s bitchy friend, eyes rolling.

“— _from Georgia_ , I feel pretty comfortable in telling you that the war destroyed our infrastructure—

“Infrastructure!”

“—for sixty, seventy years, I mean, some parts have never recovered. I can’t imagine you’d understand. Lardo said you’re from Boston, right?”

“My mother’s from Missouri,” the bitch snaps.

“Missouri never seceded,” Bitty points out brightly. “Y’all’s family is so lucky Reconstruction never beat them down the way it happened down home.”

Ford rushes around Bitty, knocking him in the shoulder, and smiles up at the bitch. “Come on,” she says in a squeaky voice, “I think I saw Lardo upstairs, you want to come check with me?”

“Non-Haus inhabitants aren’t allowed upstairs during parties,” Bitty points out, smiling his widest. “It’s in our bylaws.”

“You okay, doll?” the bitch asks Ford. “You’re the new manager after Larissa graduates, right? You, like, need anything?”

Ford laughs—she’s a good egg, Bitty is relieved to discover, tension of the room relaxing with her breathy giggle. “I’m fine. Totally fine. Bitty here’s the next captain.”

“Really,” says the bitch. “Wow.”

Bitty casts his eyes down humbly, though the bitch is still for some reason preoccupied by Ford. “It’s an elected position.”

“Wow,” says the bitch again.

“I’m very grateful for the opportunity.”

“As are we all,” says Ford, strange urgency in her voice. Bitty’s a little flattered by how badly she wants to soothe over the situation; no one could ever replace Lardo, but Ford’s clearly got the makings of a good manager.

“Gotcha,” says the bitch. She finally looks back at Bitty. “Enjoy your evening, Mr. States’ Rights.”

“I’m so glad you could see where I was coming from,” Bitty says magnanimously. “Have a good night now.”


	5. “when in Rome” - past Jack/Shitty - warnings: 18th century - rated T

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in an attempt to diversify my fic output while I spend most of my time on a longer, more serious fic, I gave myself a time limit (60 minutes, not including my very casual research) and a scenario I've been thinking about (pre-20th century hockey) and wrote this! this takes place in 1797; a “bung” is a cork designed to stopper a barrel that was evidently often used as a puck in 18th century ice hockey, not whatever you think it is.

Despite the melancholic lethargy that always followed Jack into winter’s loneliest interstices, hockey was always rousing; however Knight complained, there was much to be said for a game as morning sport, and so much the better if it were on ice. 

“You can’t be serious, you heartless fiend,” Knight groaned, whenever Jack appeared at his door with blades in hand and a hopeful expression; but he always waved Jack away to dress. London was a harsh mistress in any season, but Knight, forced by his acceptance to the bar to remain in the city much of the year, escaped to the estate at Chesham as often as the law would allow. Appearing now in the dining room with a fresh frock coat of wool and silk, he sat, crossed his knees in his curious prim way, and said, “I can’t believe your good English mother married a Frenchman; it’s no wonder you’re a degenerate.”

“Knight!” Jack admonished, glancing about the room for any misplaced servants, though Cook was humming loudly in the kitchen and Bridget as usual was nowhere she was supposed to be. “I thank you not to cast aspersions on my character.”

“Well, if only you weren’t so obvious about it,” Knight suggested, then actually clapped as Cook brought in a pot of hot chocolate and several hot rolls and butter. “Oh, I do so love the country.”

“This is quite irregular, you know; we should have waited until nine, you could have seen my parents,” Jack said, nonetheless pilfering a roll as Knight poured chocolate into two teacups.

“How surprisingly fashionable of you, to use cups at all; I’d have predicted you were still drinking out of saucers out here. And to play hockey against you, sir, having eaten nothing but air? I could hardly provide you with the proper challenge.” 

“Industry has come to Buckinghamshire too, you know,” Jack grumbled. He bit the roll in half, and closed his eyes as the sweet, steamy scent of butter drifted up. 

“You are a strange creature of the senses, aren’t you,” Knight said jovially, throwing down his own chocolate in one undignified gulp. “A changeling or something. I bet you read poetry, too.” 

“Worse.”

“What could be worse than than poetry?”

“Novels.”

“How _French_ of you.”

“Bien sûr.”

“Don’t tease, Jack, you know I have no talent for foreign tongues.”

“A shame,” Jack agreed, and they both quickly looked down at the crumbs on their plates, Jack at least thinking urgently and shamefully of that evening ten or twelve years ago when they had, with that curious mixture of bravado and naïveté belonging solely to educated and sheltered young men, spoken and caressed like lithe Greeks on a hazy, mythic beach, until Jack’s hand had haphazardly brushed against Knight’s straining breeches and they’d been forced back to the stony English soil, crouched as they were behind the vicarage not like heirs or young gentleman or even Englishmen but like filthy thieves belonging to no country, creatures who would grow into men deserving no name. In that moment, the thin potential of total freedom had hit Jack like a—like a—

“Bung to the face or not, I’m ready,” Knight declared, stuffing another roll into his sleeve, apparently unworried about staining the fabric despite his hands shiny with butter. “Don’t knock out another tooth, the last wooden one gave me a splinter inside my very cheek and I was feverish for a fortnight. Not to mention exorbitant doctor’s fees. Do you hear me, Jack? Do you? Jack?” 

“Oh, yes,” Jack said, coming back to England once more, the chill reality of winter setting tightly into his shoulders. “What was that? Be sure to aim for your teeth, is that what you said?”

“You cruel beast,” Knight squawked, “I’ll play with Cook, who loves me. Don’t you love me, Cook! You value my poor, abused teeth! See if I don’t ignore you for the rest of your days, Lord Zimmermann—!”


	6. “moratorium” - Dex - warnings: homophobia, drug use, lobster metaphors - rated T

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gave myself a time limit (30 minutes, scattered throughout my work day) and a subject (Maine, where I used to work in marine tourism).
> 
> in 1992, Newfoundland and Labrador put into place a moratorium on cod fishing, leading to subsequent severe restrictions on cod fishing in the gulf of Maine, in an effort to restore the fishery after 250 years of overfishing; this impacted the lobster population because baby cod and baby lobsters eat each other at different stages of development. “the backside” is a real place, and it’s really called “the backside,” and all the profesh lobster fishermen I know really live there.

There were three things to do, downeast: fish, go to church, or get as many illicit bottles of fentanyl as you could con out of a doctor or a relative and end it right fucking there. It was different if you came from away, or if you’d gone away and come back with money; then you might be charmed by the rugged scenery and the fishermen scattered as rustic props throughout your million-dollar views, or you might study barnacle sex or mako migration or mice genetics or whatthefuckever all the Ivy League postpostdocs did when they blew in and incidentally raised property taxes even on the year-round homes. But if you were backside born and raised, it was basically fish, God, or death. Usually all three. Usually, though not always, in that order.

“You could try scalloping, if you wanted,” Will’s uncle offered the first summer after Will came home from school, the whole family gathered around Will’s parents’ kitchen table. All the leaves had been extended, the folding chairs brought in from their usual spot in the woodshed, and even then Paul and his heavily pregnant girlfriend were sticking to the couch. “I have a friend who could use a hand. You go out farther. Well, you know that, you remember when we went out a few years ago. Could be exciting.”

Will watched his uncle’s red hands, permanently infected from hauling around ten bushels of raw herring a day, and thought about how his throat and mouth betrayed him. _Scah_ -lop. _Fah_ -thah. _Cawk_ -suckah. “Maybe I’ll look in town,” he found himself saying, then, at his uncle’s raising eyebrows, “or I could just keep on with you, right? You didn’t hire anyone else?”

“Well, Skunk filled in for the winter, but I guess I could make room for you,” his uncle said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good to have you back, kid.”

“You weren’t seriously thinking about a townie job, were you, asshole?” his brother asked later that night, having unceremoniously dumped Will out of the full-size bottom bunk in their room, forcing Will to climb to the twin bed on top.

“Aren’t you a hypocrite,” Will said; Eric had landed a sweet tourist gig on an insane scow schooner out of the other side of the island, where all the gracious summer homes clustered in nervous aversion to the mobile, prefab, and dilapidated clapboard houses pearling the rest of the coast. 

“Yeah, maybe, but,” slicing through his Ss, “at lea _sss_ t I’m not a homo _sssexu_ —” 

“ _Shut the fuck up_ ,” Will hissed.

“—Whoa, whoa, Will, what the hell.”

“Don’t talk about me like that, you piece of shit.”

“It’s a joke,” Eric said, obviously nonplussed.

“It’s not a funny one.”

“Uh, who died and made you the king of comedy, huh?”

And what could Will say to that? No one had died. Well, no one besides Will’s oldest first cousin, who’d ODd in February. It was just that some hard shell Will had been gifted as a birthright had been accidentally sloughed off by his first year away from home, leaving him tender and newly blinking through watery uncertainty at an unforgiving sun. “Shut up.”

“Oh, shit, how am I going to come back from that burn,” Eric said, audibly rolling his eyes. “Jesus. Look what one year south did to you. I’m fucking never leaving the backside again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come talk to me about fore-and-aft riggers on [tumblr](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)!


	7. “64 carat” - Jack/Bitty - warnings: none - rated PG

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for [familiar](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/familiar)!

Jack’d had two Olympic gold medals in the back of his closet, an essentially pornographic spread in the 2013 Body issue of ESPN, and a half-decent sponsorship deal with a local mattress depot when he’d blacked out at Caroline Ouellette’s kickoff summer barbecue and woke up in hospital determined to quit hockey.

“Jackie, sweetie, are you sure?” his mom asked, brushing his hair back from his face. 

“Don’t call me that,” Jack said, like he’d been saying his entire life. “Yeah. I’ve had enough of suicide drills, okay?”

It took a year of intensive therapy before Jack figured it out, then another year of paperwork, awkward phone calls, and horrible conversations with his mother where she wept and Jack sat stone-faced and silent next to her on the tasteful cream-and-Wedgewood blue settee in the parlor, but with a little intravenous help Jack at last grew enough facial hair to shave it off again.

“Okay, okay,” his mother said, settling a baseball cap on his head and touching his bangs reflexively, her fingers clearly searching for hair to tuck behind Jack’s ears. “You sure you don’t want to think about coaching for a pee wee team or something? Anything?”

“How do you think that would go?” Jack asked, waspish. You couldn’t be a professional hockey player on T, but you couldn’t be a professional hockey player if you were a woman, either. Jack had an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Wisconsin and a middling career as an assistant lacrosse coach, plus the two Olympic medals and a handful of IIHF golds besides, nothing he could go back to, nothing he wanted to pick up again in his raw hands. “No. I’m done with all that.”

Jack’s mother had asked him if he was sure all the time growing up: if he really wanted to walk so heavily, wear his hair up all the time, wear shorts so tight, if he didn’t want some concealer or to lower his voice when he got upset, all of it a polite euphemism for asking whether he really wanted to be an athlete. But, though he could see the question on the tip of her tongue, she didn’t ask again. She just said, “Okay, honey.”

Samwell looked as disgustingly picturesque in real life as it did on the website, and Jack—newly admitted masters student, keenly aware of his body mass and his newly huge pores and being thirty-two fucking years old—often found himself watching the fresh-faced undergraduates scamper around with a total lack of comprehension.

“Boy don’t I know it,” a bright Southern voice said, before a boy plopped down next to Jack on the bench surveying the quad. Jack felt himself stiffen in fear. “These youths are gonna be the death of me. I’m Eric, by the way, though my friends call me Bitty.”

On second glance, it wasn’t a boy after all, but a man with the very beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Oh yeah?” Jack said, shaking his hand. “So what should I call you?”

Eric’s hair was very bright, and his shorts were shorter and tighter than any Jack’s mother had ever complained about. “The night is young,” he said, his expansive gesture encompassing the entire sunlit campus as well as the invisible landscape between them. “Why don’t you tell me your name and we go from there?”

“I’m Jack,” Jack said. 

“Nice to meet you properly, Jack,” said Eric, his huge dark eyes crinkling with a smile at least as bright as an Olympic gold medal—which were 92.5% silver anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come give me prompts on [tumblr](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com) if you so desire!


	8. “pale blue dot” - Ransom and Holster - warnings: none - rated PG

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a Stargate Atlantis crossover; I dictated most of it through speech-to-text on my walk home from the train so it’s not my most polished work
> 
> [consider this an epigraph](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc)

It wasn’t Ransom fault that Carl Sagan got to him early: his mother let him watch an old VHS of Cosmos taped off public access while she painted his bedroom, and that was it—that was all it took.

Twenty years later, it turned out to have been a mistake. “I should have gone into financial consulting after all,” Ransom said in reflexive shock to Zelenka, five minutes after meeting Project Pegasus’s science head for the first time. “I could’ve just stared at spreadsheets all day.”

“Oh, Rodney’s harmless,” Zelenka said. “As long as you don’t look at him the wrong way, and never cut him in line for coffee, and never disagree with him.”

“—What if he’s wrong?”

Zelenka looked Ransom up and down with raised eyebrows. “It’s unlikely that he will be, at least on any of your projects. If you suspect otherwise, come to me first.”

Ransom thought this was a rather rude underestimation of his own work, but he knew better than to argue with a superior.

“And don’t worry,” Zelenka added, as he headed back to his own work station. “We rotate through the basic administrative duties; you’ll have plenty of spreadsheets to comb through.”

“Fabulous,” said Ransom, acidly.

As it turned out, the pale blue dot was invisible from Atlantis—everything was invisible from Atlantis except the Wild West expanse of Pegasus; Ransom didn’t have time to miss much, though, on account of the goddamn vampire space catfish. Surprisingly, though, it was the overflowing toilets and accompanying paperwork that took up most of Ransom’s waking energy for his first six months in another galaxy.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked the brute hulking Nordic disaster who snuck out of the jury rigged replacement in a wretched perfume.

“I didn’t do anything,” the Nordic brute replied, looking much like the central figure on the cover of one of Ransom’s sisters favorite Viking romance novels.

“Don’t lie to me, Leif, or whatever your name is,” Ransom cried. “I know what I smell.“

“I was just checking it out,” the Viking insisted. “I was worried the city was flooding again, or something.”

“A likely story. In fact, it’s a little too plausible for you to have come up with on the fly. Where is the defecation squad?”

“… What? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re up to you, you and your—your—poop parties.“

“My what?”

“You know what I’m talking about!”

“Are you okay, buddy? Do you need, like, someone to talk to? Like, a professional?”

“What, are you trying to get me in on your little scheme?”

Now the Viking was getting an odd glint in his eye. “When was the last time you had something to eat or drink?“

“None of your business!”

“How about the last time you slept?“

“What is this, the Viking inquisition?“

“…Maybe a cup of coffee?“

“Don’t. Talk. To. Me. About. Coffee.“

“What’s the matter with coffee?“

“First of all, it’s a diuretic, so it and all caffeinated look-alikes are adding to the toilet issue. But mostly it’s that Dr. McKay hoards all the good stuff and only gives it out to his favorites. And toilets are never his favorite.”

“You’re the guy taking care of the toilets? Don’t you have a degree from, like, Harvard or something?“

“Yale. But I did my undergrad at Samwell, and Yale apparently just isn’t MIT or Caltech.“

“I went to Samwell, for crying out loud.”

“I don’t know if it was worth toilet duty,” Ransom admitted, putting a hand on the Viking’s intensely muscled forearm. He felt little zapping tingles between his fingers and the Viking, like they were already best friends, like destiny settling into place or something insane like that. Oh god, the Pegasus galaxy was getting to him. Maybe he should talk to someone.

“Listen,” said the Viking, narrowing his eyes in obvious speculation. “You said Dr. McKay hides all the department’s requisitioned coffee, right?”

“The lab coffee,” Ransom agreed, sadly. “He doesn’t even keep it all in the department! He gives half of it to Major Sheppard!”

“Ugh, Sheppard,” said the Viking with obvious hierarchical-jealousy-induced relish. “Well, I saw this episode of _Wormhole X-Treme_ once that I think might be relevant to the situation.” The Viking sketches out a brief plan, and it flashes in front of Ransom’s eyes in technicolor splendor, McKay’s furious face appearing before him like a hallucination from the Ancient heart of space.

“I’m in,” Ransom says, fervently, barely before the Viking can stop talking. “Listen, what’s your name?”

The Viking looked shifty for a moment before saying, “You can’t make fun of it.”

“Do I look in the position to make fun of anyone?” Ransom pointed out.

“Oh, yeah, toilet bro,” the Viking said, eyes crinkling. “My name is really Adam but all the guys here started calling me Holster for some reason. I guess my last name was too long. Polish, German kinda thing,” he adds, with a rueful thumb at his own chest.

“The entire science department calls me Ransom because the botanists held me captive to get lab specs from McKay but he didn’t even notice for three days.”

“Dude,” said Viking.

“What?”

“ _Dude._ ”

“When was the last time you had something to eat or drink?” Ransom asked in his most McKay of tones.

“Ransom and Holster!” the Viking exclaimed, and Ransom heard it suddenly: the gate team they’d join, the long path before them cutting dashing and manly swathes through the Pegasus galaxy, the experiments Ransom would run far outside the purview of plumbing, the evil space catfish the Viking—Holster—would shoot as he kept Ransom and his experiments safe.

“Ransom and Holster,” Ransom repeated, in wonder.


End file.
